Insured access: an approach to ad-hoc information sharing for virtual organizations

A virtual organization (VO) is a group of organizations that have banded together to achieve a common goal. Often a VO could function more effectively if its members were willing to share certain information. However, a typical VO member will not want to share its own information because the member will not benefit directly from the information's reuse, yet will be blamed if the reuse turns out badly. In this paper, we present insured access, the first economically sustainable system for encouraging appropriate information sharing in VOs. Before accessing information, a VO member must purchase a liability policy from the insurance arm of the VO. Insured access uses actuarial principles to set up and run the VO's insurance arm, and provides the following benefits: VO members who share their information are compensated if the information is misused, and can expect a positive benefit from sharing; members who use information well are rewarded and those who misuse it are penalized appropriately; and the level of risk-taking in the system is capped at a certain level. We demonstrate the sustainability of insured sharing through simulations of a map-sharing scenario.